Guild Wars 2

I have played many games with Necromancers in them, my two favourite have been:

• Guild Wars 1 (by far, with Spiteful spirit and its amazing army of minions)
• Lineage 2 ( the way you could actively transfer damage from yourself to a minion that you could buff and stack HP, so only people with skill knew they had to kill your minions first.)

Sadly Guild Wars 2 does not do it for me, the game has forgotten what a Necromancer is, I mean the key is in the name, Conditions is one aspect yes, but it seems most classes have conditions, and Necros conditions are not even that great,

Minions, well I don’t need to tell anyone on this forum about the Necro’s minions how how bad they are.. I mean in GW1, I could keep them alive forever and have about 10, I could also sacrifice them when I needed health…

Our damage is poor, the class really lacks, its a shame really, I normally really love this class, I feel like I am being forced not to play how I want because the weapons I have are useless and the stats I have don’t mean anything to a Necro…

Another concept that had me pretty excited was Siphoning, that seemed perfect, I thought “They have made it so Necros can be a Melee class, I bet they want us to be good at siphoning, that will give is the best advantage of keeping us alive on the battle field..” wasn’t I wrong my main speciality at the moment (and I have spent all my gold in doing this) is to focus on Crit and siphoning with high vitality (which does not touch the amount of health that I get healed for when siphoning for some reason…)
So I must get about 1K HP ever 5 – 10 seconds or so, and I find most classes doing atlest 5k damage to me every 3 seconds.. its terrible… I have a full gold exotic set (not that that means anything these days as what I wear makes no difference..)

A long story short, playing a Necro in this game is making me not want to play the game at all, the trait tree is useless, the minions are no fun as I can only have about 5 at a time, the damage is weak and every class can kill me in about 5 hits..

I am tired A-Net, I am bored and I would like Necros to be good, because your game is pretty amazing, at the moment not as good as GW1, but has the potentiol to be better, once you sort out this Fractals and gear grabbing nonsense along with broken Necros and Guild Hopping [=

Meanwhile I think Ill just watch from afar.

Siphoning build sucks kitten in pve and pvp, seriously as a power/vit/t build, the amount of healing it does is atrocious, when someone doing 5k per hit, oh yea healing for 200 will be helpful, not! i’m just glad i’m not spec for siphoning.

I think you’re underrating necro weps, the conditions at a necros disposal as well as dismissing the power of Death Shroud (judging based on your complete lack of mention of it). The siphons are not true siphons, I assume for a few reasons (messes with gearing. Suddenly your offense is your defense. That could create…problems from a developer standpoint).

I think you should experiment more and go outside your comfort zone of your expectations of a necro, and you’ll be surprised what you’re capable of. But I’m a relentless optimist. It is a real shame about minions, but I’ve never been keen on letting AI do all my dirty work, so no big loss for me.

@Rannulf, tell me about it, why is that even in the game if its totally useless and when 4 skills from the blood magic trait make it seems like siphoning is going to be good but just spit in your face..

Also when you chose fast attack, high crit dagger(s) I plural daggers but I mean 1 because for some reason a dagger in each hand means I still only fight with 1 and its slooooow…..

High Blood magic should increase Siphoning, period.

Mega Skeleton.8259:

I think you’re underrating necro weps, the conditions at a necros disposal as well as dismissing the power of Death Shroud (judging based on your complete lack of mention of it). The siphons are not true siphons, I assume for a few reasons (messes with gearing. Suddenly your offense is your defense. That could create…problems from a developer standpoint).

My answer to that is, don’t put the Offence as Defence option infront of me if it does not work at all, infact not only does it not work, it wastes my time.

Death Shroud is pretty useless tbh the damage is very weak, it gives me a little more HP, but I can only use it when I am already screwed and by then its too late..

Mega Skeleton.8259:

I think you should experiment more and go outside your comfort zone of your expectations of a necro, and you’ll be surprised what you’re capable of. But I’m a relentless optimist. It is a real shame about minions, but I’ve never been keen on letting AI do all my dirty work, so no big loss for me.

I have gotten to 80, I have used different sets different weapons, the class is weak and squishy, it has no minions (or might as well not have any) and the conditions don’t do enough damage for me to kill anything, if the conditions do kill anyone I don’t know about it, because its unsatisfying.

Also about the AI doing the work, I’d rather them allow to to control the minions more in-depth like every other MMO with them in.. Even Lineage 2 made by NCSoft about 10 years ago have an awesome system which you can press “Stop Attacking things, just follow me or wait there!”

It’s just not good enough =/

Well, it does, sorta. + Healing increases the healing from your Life Siphon moves, which unfortunately is limited to Dagger 2, Signet of the Locust (pretty trashy), Downed 1, and Trident 3. The passive siphoning on hits and crits traits though, is a flat value, but is affected by the Bloodthirst (+50% to siphons) trait.

It’s not as effective as you want because healing is toned down in this game to be mostly restrictive outside of your heal button. It’s still viable to get sizeable healing, but it’s difficult.

So in GW1 a Necro could literally have 10 buffed minions out and an opponent would have to kill them all to kill the Necro? (Not to mention that a bunch of Necro’s on the field could pull non-gaming machines to their knees with all of that clutter to render.) It’s a matter of taste, of course, but that has made me glad that I skipped GW1.

LoVeRSaMa.3289:

@Rannulf, tell me about it, why is that even in the game if its totally useless and when 4 skills from the blood magic trait make it seems like siphoning is going to be good but just spit in your face..

Yeah, it does feel like siphoning was originally a good idea but somewhere along the line they realized that there were a lot of complications and they simplified it into something that you wouldn’t go out of your way to get. (And you would have to go out of your way to get it.)

Perhaps they were thinking of WoW’s Warlock with life leeching and fears. That was fun and challenging for PvE, but got nerfed into oblivion because of PvP since everyone hates being feared to death. Once ANet decided that fears would be short-lived — for PvP purposes and player sanity — the whole Warlock thing begins to fall apart.

Druitt.7629:

So in GW1 a Necro could literally have 10 buffed minions out and an opponent would have to kill them all to kill the Necro?

No your mixing L2 and GW1 xD
I could have 10 minions and keep them alive, but to do that I’d make myself weak, they could kill me that way, also there wasn’t any clutter in GW1 at all, was pretty basic, but you could get some real good combinations, this game is to.. whats the word.. “Single Player” your team mates dont really matter, its just about everyone doing damage in there own way, sadly the Necros way is extremely boring.

Druitt.7629:

LoVeRSaMa.3289:

@Rannulf, tell me about it, why is that even in the game if its totally useless and when 4 skills from the blood magic trait make it seems like siphoning is going to be good but just spit in your face..

Yeah, it does feel like siphoning was originally a good idea but somewhere along the line they realized that there were a lot of complications and they simplified it into something that you wouldn’t go out of your way to get. (And you would have to go out of your way to get it.)

Perhaps they were thinking of WoW’s Warlock with life leeching and fears. That was fun and challenging for PvE, but got nerfed into oblivion because of PvP since everyone hates being feared to death. Once ANet decided that fears would be short-lived — for PvP purposes and player sanity — the whole Warlock thing begins to fall apart.

That sounds like, they had lots of good ideas, half implemented them and we ended up with a half finished product..

If siphoning worked better, it would make PVP more interesting, I could stay back and die, or jump in and hope to be able to steal enough life to survive the attacking coming in.. Id require my team to take lots of agro from me, while I can do Medium Damage and keep myself alive in the process, its not too complicated, they might aswell implement it as its half done and Minions are broken so everything else is boring..

LoVeRSaMa.3289:

That sounds like, they had lots of good ideas, half implemented them and we ended up with a half finished product..

Most MMO’s are half-finished, as far as I can tell. Especially any that have PvE and PvP.

I like GW2 a lot because: 1) weapons matter (unlike, say, WoW), 2) there’s no stupid dedicated-tank-n-healer concept, 3) quests are dynamic, 4) the skill/trait differentiation, 5) the splitting of the Mage archetype into Mesmers and Elementalists, etc.

I’ve not been impressed with the fixes that ANet’s put out in the first couple of months of the game, but I am impressed with the overall level of thinking that went into the overall game itself, and hopefully they’ll be able to balance it out moving forward. And I am impressed that they’ve kept up a steady stream of patches, on basically a weekly basis and without the stupid WoW Server’s All Down Maintenance Day. (Oh, and having overflow servers way better than being queued!)

Personally, I dislike armies-of-minions because they clutter the screen. (Not referring to the GUI, but a group of 5 FotM Necros with 10 minions all running at me is unhappy.)

Heyo. I just want to say that I’ve been running a life siphon build and I feel pretty tanky in dungeons next to most other classes. I’m running a full set of exotic Clerics gear and masterwork sapphire accessories. Of course it requires a dedicated set of equipment and accessories to really make it work and doing so sacrifices heavy damage output or condition building. But when it comes to survivability in mobs I think Necromancer is up there. This is what I run.

http://en.gw2codex.com/build/21851-life-siphon-necro

Basically with 3 wells and all of them having the ability to siphon life (one that is a heal as well), as well as siphoning whenever I hit something, even more on crits, and a base HP of 21K just from traits, and then a full bar of Death Shroud, I’ve been able to withstand a lot of brawls. Not to mention Necro has the get-out-of-jail free card that is Skill 3 in Death Shroud. Anytime I get pulled or and kind of CC, I immediately jump into DS just to fear them away. It’s a free action regardless of state. Even if that’s on CD you have Spectral Walk to break stuns and get away if things get hairy. And the minion just because I like having at least one fool running around. Plus he’s the only way I can do any decent damage to objects. As long as you space your wells out well (ha) then you could become nigh unstoppable. Plus, you can swap traits around life making life transfer heal allies, and now you are suddenly a heal/tank.

This build lacks heavy single-target damage but can do a lot to a whole group of folks. If you hit all 3 wells and use your staff skills you can throw down mobs in no time. But then you leave yourself vulnerable while you wait for CDs. Also, can’t really hurt objects, especially if its out of range for the daggers and you are left using staff.

It’s not a perfect class but the life siphon mechanics work well to me.

+healing was my first approach to a Life Siphon build as well.
I was very durable too.

By now i like to have gear without healing stats and get precision instead for on crit life leech effects.

But it’s probably a matter of personal preference.